The historian David Chandler, in A History of Cambodia, reminds us that such monetary assault is not at all new:
The Angkor ruins are Cambodia's national treasure -- their image is on the flag -- like the Pyramids belong to Egypt and Guinness to Ireland. But during the week I spent there, the temples struck me as distinctively Cambodian in only geographical and historical ways. Just as the worthless riel only fronts for the US dollar, Angkor now seems beholden to the Western nations that finance its upkeep, and whose citizens travel thousands of miles to see it. We have showered the citadel with silver coins, carried off the Cambodians' sacred cow, and busied ourselves deciphering its hidden "books." But what have we found, what have we learned? The writer-filmmaker Rudolph Wurlitzer, in Hard Travel to Sacred Places, worries that his visit to Southeast Asia amounts to little more than "visual materialism." "Are we just collecting and cataloguing sacred images that will soon disappear like dreams?" What we buy is ephemeral, no matter how heavy or precious the stones seem. The merchandise can mean only the sum of money we paid to acquire and preserve it. (Our untrained tourist eyes never spot the modern beams and joists supporting the restored Angkor Wat.) Thus "collecting and cataloguing" anything -- new clothes, the skulls of dead Khmer at the Killing Fields, or even one's travel experiences -- performs a consumer transaction. Thus I've talked myself out of sobsey.com. I can only propose that these are mere words on a computer screen, ephemeral even in situ; I ask no fee for them; I'm only exploiting myself.
According to [the popular legend of preah ko preah kaev]... the citadel of Lovek [Phnom Penh] was so large that no horse could gallop around it. Inside were two statues, preah ko ("sacred cow") and preah kaev ("sacred precious stone"); inside the bellies of these statues, "there were sacred books, in gold, where one could learn formulae, and books where one could learn about anything in the world.... Now the king of Siam wanted to have the statues, so he raised an army and came to fight the Cambodian king." .... The Thai cannon fired silver coins, rather than shells, into the bamboo hedges that served as Lovek's fortifications. When the Thai retreated, the Cambodians cut down the hedges to get at the coins and thus had no defenses when the Thai returned in the following year to assault the city. When they had won, the Thai carried off the two statues to Siam. After opening up their bellies... "they were able to take the books which were hidden there and study their contents. For this reason, [the Thai] have become superior in knowledge to the Cambodians."
The legend of Preah Ko Preah Kaev does not divulge the contents of the 'sacred books.' Perhaps the Khmer themselves never knew; the elite -- Eastern and Western -- have always mystified the holy texts in order to keep the masses docile. The legend suggests instead that the statues themselves gave the Khmer a kind of totemic superiority, which the Thai repossessed by a first act of payment: silver coins. Power rests not so much in what is actually known, but in what is shown to exist while kept secret. (I'll encounter this phenomenon again later, in slightly different form, on the American Indian reservations.) Wealth exudes a daunting charisma. Maybe this helps explain my discomfort whenever I, a solidly middle-class American, had to open my money pouch in public. The source of my suddenly protean power was really just a bunch of paper; its only religious inscription, and a dubious one at that, was that we trusted in God.
